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Does B2B have to mean Boring-to-Boring?

And are B2B companies doomed to being so industrial-strength impersonal that they have no shot at leveraging social media?

If you find yourself falling into that conventional-wisdom trap, then you need to take a look at the remarkable 2-year social journey undertaken by the world’s largest shipping company, Maersk Line.

Because Maersk, whose 25,000 employees move hundreds of millions of products around the globe each year via 600 giant cargo ships and 2.2 million containers, sports yet another world-class number: it has more than 1,000,000 fans on Facebook.

And those fans have become actively engaged with the global Maersk community of customers, employees, prospects, partners and other followers all across the company’s seven hubs of social interactions: share, discuss, commerce, publish, location, network, and games.

“It’s definitely been a crazy ride—but in a good way,” said Maersk Line social media leader Jonathan Wichmann in a recent phone interview.

When Wichmann joined the company about two years ago, he had absolutely no idea that the Danish shipping giant would in a short time become something of a global superstar in the enterprise social scene.

“When I started, as far as social goes we were at zero—absolute zero. People would tell me, ‘We’re not right for social media, we’re boring, no one’s going to like us, and who will support us?’ ”he recalled. “A lot of people inside the company as well as outside just didn’t think it would take.”

Ah, but social has indeed sunk some roots at Maersk. But that process required not only some trial and error but also some very fresh thinking.

“I started out doing some boring posts—very safe—and now I can’t even remember them,” Wichmann said. “And then I came across thousands and thousands of remarkable photos in our digital archives, and not just of containers but of our ships and the oceans they cross and the various things you encounter in global commerce.”

The new perspective took hold, Wichmann said, when he realized that “With those amazing shots, it occurred to me that we have something good going for us right from the beginning. I realized that there are so many untold stories—and wonderful untold stories—in that old company, and that those stories would have broad appeal because Maersk Line is truly a global company.”

Trusting in Wichmann and his early belief that social could help demonstrate to the world that Maersk Line is a dynamic and compelling force in the world of global commerce, the company decided to keep its social operation in-house rather than hiring an external agency that might know all the current buzzwords but would not be able to fathom the spirit and soul of Maersk.

“We learned that at least in our case, companies sometimes don’t even realize who they are, or who they aren’t—for years we thought we were boring, so we helped convey to the world the idea that we are boring. But we’re not.”

Wichmann still chuckles at the notion that a Danish logistics and container company can have 1 million Facebook fans, and he says that the breakthrough factor behind that achievement was the company’s decision to start small and keep it simple.

“The public reception has been remarkable and it’s mostly been via Facebook, which is where we wanted to start because it’s a global social network and we’re a global company. So we built out our presence there first, and then expanded to other channels,” which now included Twitter, , +, Tumblr, Instagram, and Pinterest.

“It might sound odd, but the truth is that it’s really been fairly easy—it hasn’t been a struggle, even in such a big company that had never done anything like this,” said Wichmann. “And I found out that the company was ready to make a new move like this even though it didn’t know it was ready.”

At the CloudWorld event earlier this year in Munich, Wichmann was a featured speaker and also took some time to share some of his thoughts about the Maersk social-media adventure as part of the BizCouch 1:1 interview series. In that interview, Wichmann spoke about how the social impact is being felt in a growing and diverse set of functional areas within Maersk Line, including sales, crisis management, and supply-chain management:

Sales impact: “In the beginning, I thought, ‘We’re never going to sell anything—we’re never going to sell containers on Facebook.’ But we’re actually seeing now that we can do things within sales that are interesting, but not in the very apparent and spammy way of doing it that some people would imagine. It’s more subtle, and it’s about empowering employees to do it, and to share knowledge.”

Crisis Management: “We have a team that we all know is prepared if something happens, but we have a very relaxed approach to it—we’re not trying to hide anything. So if we have negative stories, then we just share them. So then, who’s going to bully you about ‘You didn’t do this or that’? Because we can say, ‘We already told you so—it’s not something we’re trying to hide.’ So that approach is about being credible, and about learning from your own mistakes and what you don’t do really well, and then getting it out into the open so employees and customers can see it and we can all learn from it. That whole approach has helped us a great deal whenever there’s been something going on that’s moving toward a potential crisis issue.”

Supply-Chain Optimization: “It wouldn’t make sense for us to go for the big extremes—it’s really about looking at social technologies and seeing how we can use them to support the core business. It might not be a Maersk spaceship flying into the atmosphere,” he says with a laugh, “but it’s more about getting people to share their knowledge and get better at working together. And it’s more about optimizing supply chains and stuff like that—it’s not going to be as visible as our Facebook page, but it’s going to be more about getting integrated into the business.”